For four decades, Frederick Stone, who has died aged 87, took a leading role in the development of child psychiatric services in Scotland. He was professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Glasgow University from 1977 to 1987, and his work had a significant impact on the development of the children's welfare and judicial hearings system.

Fred was born in the west end of Glasgow into a Jewish family. He attended Hillhead high school, then studied medicine at Glasgow University, from which he graduated in 1945. His subsequent work in paediatrics spanned infant mental health, autism, liaison psychiatry, and adoption. He was one of the pioneers of modern child and adolescent psychiatry, his analytical training having sharpened his ability to understand children with emotional and developmental problems.

In his early years of clinical practice, Fred was influenced by the work of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby. While Bowlby was looking at the impact of maternal separation on infants in postwar London, Fred was working as a clinical child psychologist in the newly established state of Israel, where he encountered many traumatised children, including some affected by the Holocaust. His experience there, and in Clydeside when he returned in the mid-1950s to work with children in one of the most socially deprived areas of Europe, took him beyond Bowlby to view childhood disorders in the context of distressed and dysfunctional families.

He achieved highly significant changes that made a lasting difference to services for children in Scotland. His appointment as consultant child psychiatrist at Glasgow's Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Yorkhill, in 1954, led to the establishment the following year of the first academic department of child psychiatry in Scotland, developing the concept of multidisciplinary working among health specialists in a hospital setting – now commonplace, then breaking new ground.

Further steps in multidisciplinary work with families came through the subsequent opening in Glasgow of the Woodlands day centre, where therapy could be combined with education and play, and the development of the Notre Dame child guidance clinic and Fern Tower adolescent unit. As visiting consultant to these progressive establishments, Fred gave much time and creative energy.

His appointment as the child psychiatrist on the Kilbrandon committee (1963-65) gave him an extraordinary influence on the subsequent development of juvenile justice in Scotland. He, more than anyone, was responsible for the central doctrine of what came to be known as the Kilbrandon philosophy – that in all cases where "children were in trouble", whether referred for their offences or being in need of care or protection, "something in the normal upbringing process had, for whatever reason, fallen short". Children's problems, and the means to their solution, are always linked to families. The welfare of the child should be the entire focus of all public interventions, and children and parents should be involved in decisions that affect them along with a panel of fellow citizens.

Fred remained committed to the system, introduced in 1971, first by providing professional advice to hearings, then by training its personnel – professionals and lay members – and eventually by writing about it. He had particularly high regard for those who devoted their public service to the wellbeing of others' children, and felt that professionals who worked with children and families should also be good citizens, freely giving their time – which he did unstintingly. He was always heavily committed, but never too busy.

He was an extraordinarily good lecturer, too. With wit and without the use of jargon, he made complex matters of child psychiatry, developmental psychology and family dynamics accessible to non-specialists.

When Fred retired from Yorkhill and became emeritus professor, many of his aspirations for the improvement in services to children and families had come to fruition. There were more psychiatric consultant services, more adolescent in-patient facilities and better collaborative working between health service and other professionals. There is also the Scottish Centre for Autism, and the academic unit and a paediatric liaison team at Yorkhill, where the Frederick Stone unit for child protection bears his name. However, his ambition for a comprehensive mental health service for children has not quite been realised.

Fred was always active in the Glasgow Jewish community and was a founder member and honorary life president of Cosgrove Care, an organisation that supports people with learning difficulties. He was also an extremely musical man with wide-ranging tastes that took in Mozart, Gershwin and Ellington. His skills as a pianist were such that he was once offered a job with a cruise ship dance band in the 1930s.

He wrote or contributed to many seminal texts including Psychiatry and the Paediatrician, Child Psychiatry for Students, Juvenile Justice in Scotland, and Youth Justice and Child Protection, and maintained an interest in services for children long after retiring. He was a secretary general of the International Association of Child Psychiatry, a foundation fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and in 1991 was appointed OBE for services to children.

His wife, Zelda, whom he married in 1946, died in 2006. He is survived by a brother, two sons and a daughter, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.